Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "Gravity zero," Koshō announced, securing the watch and taking hold of the edge of her display. "Engines hot."

  "All systems tracking," Hayes announced at almost the same moment. "Beam nacelles are live, missile racks one through nine are cleared to load. Shall I load out?"

  "Rack with flash loads by evens," Hadeishi replied in a crisp voice. "Timing, Mister Hayes, I want timing." He turned slightly to look at his exec again. "Time, Sho-sa?"

  Koshō came to attention, though no one save a shipmate could have told the difference from one moment to the next. "All hands to station in ninety-six seconds, Chu-sa. Engines hot, systems secured in one hundred fifty seconds."

  Hadeishi's chair vibrated again and he knew the missile racks were loading, magazine carrels rotating into place, the slender shapes of Hayai Roku sliding into their launch tubes.

  "Admirable," the captain replied, looking to the communications station. "Emissions status, Mister Smith?"

  "T-relay offline," the midshipman replied, cheeks flushed, the beat of his heart thudding in the artery at his neck. "Main array in passive. Comm array on the Palenque forced down, ship to ground forced down, emissions are at minimum. Ship-skin neutral."

  "Hayes-tzin? Backscatter from civilian sources? Visual confirmation?"

  The weapons officer suppressed a start—he'd expected to report the even-numbered missile racks loaded and their launch status green—hands moving in a blur across his panel. Hadeishi watched keenly—the request to double-check the light cruiser's emissions status from local civilian sources was unexpected, though they were rarely in position to take direct control of civilian sensor apparatus—and counted the seconds until the Thai-i responded. Out of the comer of his eye, the captain watched Koshō counting as well, ancient watch magically back in her hand.

  “Civilian sensors are blank," Hayes said, his voice a fraction rushed. "Visual confirm is ... is positive. I have outline from Palenque navigational cam." A finger speared sideways and a new v-pane unfolded on Hadeishi's display. With interest, the captain examined the image. "Backscatter from satellites is null, backscatter from Palenque main array is ... null."

  "Interesting." Hadeishi folded his hands in his lap. The civilian ship mounted an entire array of exterior cameras to assist in docking at a station or other orbital facility. Apparently they also included moderately sophisticated pattern-matching soft, which had picked the outline of the Cornuelle—even at one hundred kilometers—out of the background starfield. The Palenque comp could not make a match for ship type or registry, but it knew something was within its programmed avoidance limits. "Maintain feed from the civilian ship, Hayes-tzin. Sho-sa Koshō, please adjust ship orientation by degrees."

  Cocooned in his command chair, Hadeishi could not feel the massive bulk of the Cornuelle begin to move, though the video feed on the Palenque picked up the spark of her maneuvering engines as they began a topwise spin. The threat-well and most of the displays remained constant—only the one pickup showing the arc of Ephesus shifted, the planet turning slowly upside down.

  "Five second burn." Koshō's face remained porcelain, her eyes calmly tracking the movement of the ship. "Burn halted."

  Hadeishi watched the comp on the Palenque adjust, seeing the image—and the identifier—flicker in and out, adapting, adapting ... then the lock vanished and the civilian software declared the "foreign ship" to have vanished. "There you are.... Reverse roll, Koshō-san."

  The Cornuelle reappeared for a moment on the civilian display as momentum carried the cruiser back into a recognizable configuration. A second series of burns halted roll, then nudged her back, second by second, into an unidentifiable "hole" against the wall of night.

  Hadeishi nodded. Koshō was already making a note in the log, while Hayes and Smith spoke softly into their throat mikes, adding their own commentary. The captain waited until they were done, then lifted his chin. "Admirably swift," he said. "Lieutenant Koshō, please make a note to schedule an exercise—at a later date—to determine the detection envelope of the civilian cameras. Then double-check with Fleet to see they have the same information. Mister Hayes, you may stand down your missile crews." He glanced over his display again. Everything remained quiet.

  "Now there is the matter of this mysterious shuttle. I want a full report by end of watch, which we will discuss over dinner."

  Koshō and the others nodded sharply and Hadeishi cancelled alert status himself. No need to disturb the cooks, he thought, though perhaps I should—an alert during dinner would certainly put everyone to the test.... "We will remain under emissions control, Lieutenant. Move the ship to a different orbit. No sense in being too predictable."

  Even though no one seems to be here to see us. ... But Hadeishi knew exactly how easy it would be to hide in the interplanetary dark, unmoving, unnoticed, nearly invisible.

  "Hrrmmm ..." Magdalena was curled up again, both long arms lapped over her knees, snout resting on plush, close-napped black fur. One of her displays showed the faint traces of the Cornuelle shifting orbit—the flare of the big maneuvering drives were impossible to disguise, particularly at this short range—and the other presented an image of the "mysterious" shuttle the little bird had found.

  The Hesht was not pleased with the man's efficiency or the power of his comps. She had watched with entirely open avarice as the Méxica had unpacked three copper-colored blocks—each one no more than a forepaw wide—from his baggage and set them up in a cluster with the cabin display. She could smell something secret and powerful about them, and her tail lashed slowly from side to side, fur itching with the desire to take hold of them for just a moment.

  At the same time, she was entirely convinced tweaking the tail of this human would be bad luck, for her, for her adoptive pack and for her hunt-sister Gretchen. So she watched impatiently, busying herself with a thorough search of the young sky watcher male's planetary scan archive. Magdalena had convinced herself there was a great deal of information hidden in the c-storage racks down at the observatory base. Many secrets, she mused. Waiting to be revealed to the light of day, like a heep burrow peeled back by a gentle claw.

  She checked the progress of her image scan. The number was far, far too low to satisfy her desire, so a claw dragged an override and the Palenque main comp began to devote nearly thirty percent capacity to her search.

  Hadeishi sat back, letting his steward remove the small dinner bowls from the table. The momentary burst of activity this afternoon had broken an almost imperceptible weight of boredom, though now—with nothing new to engage his attention—he felt the deadening effect of routine stealing up on him again. This pricked his mind to something like angry motion, and he'd spent the period between end of watch and dinner devising a series of sudden training alerts, each one timed to come at the most inappropriate or difficult time.

  Standing on station like this—waiting, with nothing in the offing—was particularly trying. Hadeishi prided himself on being a calm man—particularly in the face of tumult or crisis—but amid this stultifying sameness he found himself reaching for something, anything, to enliven the day. Today, particularly after sensing Sho-sa Koshō's quiet pride in the crew's reaction time to the alert, he was tempted to press her until her imperturbable calm broke.

  That is entirely unworthy, he reminded himself. Your boredom is not an excuse to torment a fellow officer. Still, the prospect intrigued—Hadeishi was beginning to wonder if the lieutenant had ever truly lost her temper.

  The steward set down small pale green plates, each one containing a single orange wedge. Hadeishi speared his with a single hashi and popped the sweet fruit into his mouth. Around the low table, his officers did the same—each in their own way—and then the stewards finished clearing the last of the dishes. Mugs of tea appeared, each steaming, filling the air with the turned-earth aroma of a high-grade sencha.

  "Very well, then," he said, after a decent interval. "What have you found?"

  Koshō bowed politely. Like the others, s
he was officially off-duty, so she tied back the sleeves of her kimono with a deft motion and turned her head toward the captain with a very proper air. Beside her, Hayes moved aside, leaving a section of otherwise blank wall unobstructed.

  "As Hummingbird-san, reported, a Valkyrie-class mining shuttle was observed in the northern hemisphere of Ephesus Three. The aircraft was banking over an extensive lava field at north sixty, west ninety-eight degrees." Koshō indicated the blank wall with a control stylus and a rectangular image appeared—an enhanced version of the shuttle in flight. "Due to space limitations on the peapods, Smalls-tzin had set them to record one image every half hour at moderate visual density. As a result, this snapshot of the shuttle is only a very small section of a very large image area. We do not have enough data to extract a ship name or identification number from the visible surfaces of the shuttle."

  The lieutenant commander motioned with the wand again. "We have scanned the snapshots for two-hour periods on either side of the sighting, and there is no evidence of the shuttle in flight. Given the altitude and location of the mining shuttle, we believe it was descending from orbit and then landed before the next set of pictures could be taken."

  "And was hidden," Hadeishi commented. "Within thirty minutes."

  "We believe so," Koshō said, inclining her head. "The Valkyrie-class is usually attached to a Tyr-class mobile refinery." Another image appeared, this of a huge, ungainly and entirely ugly collection of massive spheres, exposed girders and bulbous fuel tanks all arranged around an extended hexagonal core. "A Tyr can carry as many as fifteen shuttles, each with a nominal operating range of about eight hundred million k, with an operational duration of twenty days. They are designed for light exploration, survey and ore sample recovery."

  "I see. Any pirate or wildcatter would be entirely pleased to have one under his control. Was the shuttle's descent within Line-of-sight of the Palenque?"

  "No, Hadeishi-san. At the time of descent, the civilian ship was on the opposite side of the planet."

  "Then our friends knew of the expedition ship and its detection envelope."

  Koshō nodded, though the stylus raised to indicate a point.

  "The miners may not have been aware of the weather satellites. Peapods are small and innocuous, with a relatively tiny aspect. If the refinery ship was somewhere else in the system—in the asteroid belt, for example—the shuttle might have made a scouting trip in, unaware of being observed."

  Hadeishi frowned. "How did they hide the shuttle, then? Their first trip should have included a great deal of loitering in atmosphere, looking for someplace suitable to set down. They would have shown up on subsequent satellite images."

  "This is true, sir. But what if they already knew where to land?" Koshō's eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. "What if someone had already found a place for them to set down, had left a beacon, one leading them to something of interest?"

  Hadeishi's boredom—ephemeral as it was—dropped away like silk crumpling to a courtesan's tatami. "Doctor Russovsky."

  "She is the most likely candidate," the lieutenant commander said, slowly. The Fleet had avoided a great deal of trouble by promulgating a policy assuming all citizens, regardless of national affiliation or descent, were innocent as lambs. Treachery and rebellion, of course, were instantly and brutally repressed. Making racial distinctions about reliability ... Hadeishi was only too aware of his own failing in this regard. Even Anderssen's name set his teeth on edge. A Russian... who could really trust a Russian?

  "On the other hand," Koshō continued in a careful tone, "the other scientists have also made expeditions into the hinterlands. Russovsky's use of an ultralight, however, has allowed her to range far and wide across the northern hemisphere."

  "Did the Valkyrie make this flight before or after Russovsky returned to base camp with the cylinders?"

  "Before," Koshō said, cueing up a timeline. "But only by a few days."

  "So—she could have found the cylinders, informed her compatriots and then headed back to base with some samples, while leaving the rest for these 'miners' to secure."

  The lieutenant commander nodded, dark eyes glittering in the light of the overheads. "Yes, Chu-sa, but the real question is: Did Russovsky realize what the cylinder would do, if it were disturbed?"

  Hadeishi grunted and a sardonic smile creased his face. "You mean, Sho-sa, did she murder the crew of the Palenque to ensure no one noticed a shuttle lifting off with a hold full of First Sun artifacts? That is an excellent question."

  THE WESTERN BADLANDS, EPHESUS III

  A burning spot appeared on the eastern horizon; Toniatuh lifting a gleaming limb over the rim of the world, his light gilding the crowns of a great army of stone pinnacles. Wind-carved tufa—fantastically sculpted into corkscrew towers, hollow mushroom-shaped domes, translucent veils and jagged peaks—began to glow yellow-orange as the dawn reached out. Beneath the shining towers, deep ravines and canyons filled with dust and sand twisted through the wilderness. Down below the gimlet eye of the sun, remaining night shone with a quiet, subtle glow. Myriad sparks and gleams hid among the sand, sheltering beneath meters of fine-grained dust.

  The sun continued to rise, the pressure of his gaze sending gusts racing through the canyons and moaning between scalloped reeflike towers. With the keening hiss of slowly heating air came a second sound—something foreign to the sere landscape—a humming drone echoing back and forth between cliff and precipice and spire. Light glinted from metal and the broad-winged shape of an ultralight appeared in the eastern sky. A contrail of vapor twisted away behind shining metal and plastic, the Midge sweeping gracefully past three turretlike pinnacles. The drone of the engine reverberated in the canyons below, but the slow life hiding in the sand heard nothing.

  Day continued to broaden, his shining white coat rising to cover the east, driving the last shadows of night deeper and deeper into the ravines and crevices. The ultralight drifted among the towers, trending north and west, wings dipping as the pilot searched for a landing place. The thinning air was robbing the aircraft of lift, making the engine work harder and harder.

  The ultralight banked sharply, the engine's droning pitch sliding up in scale, and the Midge circled. One of the great mushroom-shaped domes had cracked and splintered in some lost age, leaving a great bowl ringed with ragged shell-like walls. Sand and splintered tufa made an irregular plain within. The approach was short, the space confined, but the Midge drifted in to within a meter of the ground, then nosed up—into a stall—and bounced to the ground. A curtain of dust rose, then drifted away. The pitted, scored canopy opened and a weathered-looking woman rolled out to stand upright. She stretched, rolled her head from side to side, and set about securing the aircraft.

  When the sand anchors were set, she climbed a slope of pebbly, red sand to a shallow overhang. A flat stone blackened by carbon scoring made a rest for her cooking kit and a smudged line around the edge of the opening guided her hand in tacking up a mirror-bright sunshade. Then she lay down and closed her eyes, head resting on a tattered woolen blanket.

  Below her in the basin, the Gagarin chattered and chuckled to itself, then the mirrored surface of the upper wing flashed and onboard systems oriented themselves towards the sky; searching for an answering signal.

  "We're not going to be able to set down," Fitzsimmons shouted, trying to make himself heard over the roar of four airbreathing turbines. He hung half out of the starboard side of the shuttle, one hand gripping a stanchion inside the cargo door. Wind howled around him, rushing up from the basin below, in a tornado of flying sand and dust. The Gunso's combat visor was down, protecting his face from the rain of sharp-edged rock. His free hand was on a descender, back heavy with gun-rig and equipment bags.

  "There's no place else to land," Parker's voice chattered from his earbug. "Can you drop in?"

  "Yes," Fitz leaned out, arm stiff. The ground below was obscured by the dust storm, but he'd jumped into worse. "Deckard—let's fly."

&nbs
p; The shuttle adjusted, tilting, and Deckard crowded into the cargo door beside Fitz. Both men were kitted out in drop gear—full combat suits, a light loadout of weapons, ammunition and tools. Their descender lines spooled out and their combat visors painted the nearly-invisible wire a virulent green. Fitzsimmons waited for the shuttle's natural roll to top out, then stepped off, monofil zipping through the magnetic clamp-ons in his hand and attached to his belt.

  He landed gently, jerking up a half-meter short of the ground and dropping catlike onto the sand. Fitz detached from the line and tucked his hand clamp away in one quick, automatic motion. Deckard was down a second later and both men broke away from the landing point at a run. Fitzsimmons led with his Iztanuma PRK80 riotgun—no sense in packing the combat rifle or even the lighter shipgun, not for a pickup—and sprinted up the slope toward the overhang they'd spotted from the air. Deckard swung to the right, laboring in heavier, softer sand, but he kept up.

  Above them, the shuttle's exhaust vents shifted and the aircraft slid sideways, clearing the bowl. The whirlwind of sand gusted down, dropping veils of dust across broken stone.

  A moment later, Fitzsimmons brushed aside the shimmering metallic drape covering the overhang entrance and found an older, sandy-haired woman staring up at him with a quizzical expression, "Doctor Russovsky?"

  She blinked as if waking from a deep sleep. Fitzsimmons was struck by her lack of surprise or reaction to his appearance—he knew he must seem strange in a dust-streaked combat suit, pointing what was obviously a weapon at her. He glanced around the shallow cave. Her gear was neatly stacked against a sloping wall, the makings of dinner laid out on a stone.